Republican Racism: The New Ten Top Hits

It used to be that the Rethugs used "dog whistle" politics to display their just-under-the-surface racism. They could talk about the infamous Chicago "welfare queen", for example, without actually coming out and saying she was Black, but everyone knew who she was.

Ronald Reagan was a master of this, but even he kept it more or less symbolic. That's why he could, without even a blip on the media radar, go to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980 to announce his candidacy for the presidency, standing on hallowed ground watered by the blood of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the three civil rights workers who had been murdered there in June 1964.

But in the ensuing 31 years, the party's racism has become more visible, more blatant, and more of a siren call than a dog whistle.

Over at Alternet, African-American commentator Chauncy De Vega has an insightful (and inciteful) piece entitled The 10 Most Racist Moments of the GOP Primary (So Far) that is well worth the read.

In it are the usual suspects: Newt Gingrich wanting to make "poor inner-city children" (code for "Black") work as janitors and bitch-slapping that uppity Juan Williams on Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday while standing under a huge Confederate flag and Rick Santorum calling, in essence, Black people "parasites" who are lazy and want to live off the hardwork earnings of White people, but there's also our old buddy, Herman Cain, calling Black Americans out for living under the generous hand of the Democratic Party "plantation" system, and equating conservative Blacks as runaway slaves. And let's not forget Michelle ("Our Negroes are better than their Negroes") Bachmann claiming that slavery was actual good for Black people.

It's appalling that the Rethugs don't even think they have to try to appear not to be racists any more.

State of the Union and Kerry's Face

Like many people, I watched Obama give the annual State of the Union speech last night. Blah-blah-blah, election year, yadda yadda yadda... I kind of miss the days when Baby Doc Bush was bound to come out with something totally fucking off the wall, like "human-animal hybrid switchgrass" and shit like that. I used to watch him just for those little surprises, and I was rarely disappointed.

But no doubt about it, Obama is a dynamic speaker, and he came out aggressively, if not combatively, in sticking it to the Rethugs on a lot of points. The most fun of the night was watching de facto Speaker of the House and full-time asshole Eric Cantor keeping a stone face but squirming in his seat like a schoolboy with pinworms every time they cut away to him.

Beyond that, did everybody see John Kerry's face? He looked like he'd been mugged. Jesus, what the fuck happened to him?

She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed had an answer: Teresa (his wife and inadvertent heir to the Heinz fortune) smacked him up the face with a ketchup bottle when he came home late. reeking of cheap whiskey and cheaper perfume.

Of course the "truth" is a little more mundane -- he was playing hockey and got smacked with a hockey stick. At least that's the official word from Kerry's office... Which I suppose is believable, if you've ever been to a hockey game. As Rodney Dangerfield once said, "I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out."

Attention Whore

As if we didn't need any more reminders that bloviating blow-hole Newtie Gingrinch is an attention whore, today he comes out and says he won't play if he can't be cheered on by his mindless slavering fans.

Newt "threw down a gauntlet" to the media -- which he naturally both loves and hates -- calling NBC's Brian Williams to task for trying to keep the debate audience quiet:

"I wish, in retrospect, I had protested when Brian Williams took them out of it because I think it's wrong. And I think he took them out of it because the media is terrified that the audience is going to side with the candidates against the media, which is what they've done in every debate." For future debates, Mr. Gingrich said "we're not going to allow that to happen."
"The media doesn't control free speech," he added. "People ought to be allowed to applaud if they want to. It was almost silly."

Got that? Free speech. Yeah, free for Gingrinch, not so free for those who came to see a debate (such as it is) and not the chanting spectacle of a bunch of Newtie robots gathered up from the Teabagger clubhouse and required to check their brains at the door.

It's long been a proven mind control tactic, getting people to act together, feeding off each others' energy and reinforcing the in-group mentality.

You don't have to look any further than military basic training which employs cadence chants and group actions to train soldiers to act and think together as a unit. And of course Nazi Germany was notorious for this. Watch Leni Reifenstahl's propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will for a textbook example of this in action.

Sidebar: Did you ever notice how many times Newtie has called something "silly"? It's been a lot over the years. Can't he come up with any other descriptive adjectives? Here's what Dictionary.com has to say about "silly":

1. weak-minded or lacking good sense; stupid or foolish: a silly writer.
2. absurd; ridiculous; irrational: a silly idea.
3. stunned; dazed: He knocked me silly.

Given that, I'm willing to stipulate that Newt Gingrinch know silly when he sees it. Except when he's looking in the mirror...

A Delete Key for Slavery

The Farnsworth family has deep roots in Tennessee. One of my relatives was a poker-playing whiskey-drinking buddy of Andrew Jackson, and his brother, my direct ancestor, built one of the first hominy mills in Central Tennessee. Some of my cousins still live there.

So over the years I approached my Tennessee roots with an odd mix of pride and shame. While the state saw the establishment of one of the very first colleges intended specifically for African-Americans in the nation, we can't forget that the Ku Klux Klan was also organized there. Fast forward to 1968 and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, and you can see that the civil rights struggle for black Americans has a long and shadowy history in the state.

So it doesn't come as a surprise -- although sadly it really should -- that the Tennessee Tea Party ("oh, no, we're not racists!") is now pushing for a rewrite of school history textbooks to downplay the whole issue of the so-called Founding Fathers owning slaves, because it makes them look bad...

As if the Tea Party hasn't got enough on its hands with their rewriting reimagining of the rest of American history.

The Head Teabagger in Tennessee, Hal Rounds, along with others of his bent says that:

they want the state legislature to force teachers to teach history in the way they see it. In other words, they want to re-write history to exclude the fact that the Founding Fathers owned slaves, because according to The Memphis Commercial Appeal, the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”
The group wants to change textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.” It’s a fancy way of saying let’s take the role of minorities out of our American history textbooks so our past leaders will look good. [Emphasis added]

You can't help but think that the next step will be to remove any mention of the Holocaust from the history of WWII because it makes the Germans look bad...

The Gift That Keeps On Giving...

Newtie Gingrich
Crawled out of his ditch
And shot off the legs of his rival.

And with that little piece of song-parody doggerel, I am celebrating the victory of Fig Newton Gingrich over Mittens Rawmoney in South Carolina yesterday.

If anyone on the Rethug side ought to be easy to beat come November, it's Newt.

Yayy!!!

Ice Storm

Everyone knows "Murphy's Law" but there are some adjuncts to it, one of which is the "Unspoken Law", which holds that as soon as you make a comment on something, if it's good it goes away and if it's bad, it happens...

After crowing the other day about keeping our electricity, fate stepped in and dealt a cruel hand. I (and some 250,000 of my closest friends) were without power for a couple of days after an ice storm hit right on the heels of the snow storm.

We were powerless for 41+ hours (others, not so fortunate, are still without electricity) and nothing makes you realize how dependent you are on technology than being deprived of it.

After the first night in a house that sank to 41 degrees internal temperature, I said, "Okay, I get it. You made your point. Now can I have some warmth?" I didn't get an answer to that plea, however.

We have a gas heater, but it's out in the garage and relies on electricity to force the warm air into the cold interior. I also had installed last year a "hot water on demand" system that, while it uses natural gas, still relies on ... electricity ... to make it work.

We had to go "old school" for our entertainment (old school being circa 2001) and use an old CD player that also plays .mp3 format tracks. Luckily I'm a fan and collector of so-called Old Time Radio shows, so after 34 episodes of Lum 'n' Abner, along with three episodes of Lights Out and three episodes of Sherlock Holmes, the lights finally came on and we fought like children to get in the shower first.

After an overnight temperature hovering in the 20s, we lost three trees out of a total of 19 on our small city lot (planted around the outside edge so none fell on the house), and a bunch of limbs that dropped off all around the neighborhood with annoying frequency and loud reports that sounded like gunshots, the temperature rapidly warmed up to nearly 50 when a coastal front finally moved in with enough rain to melt the ice. At one point I had to go outside to warm up, since the outside temperature was higher than the inside temperature...

It's a crazy world, all right, and if I hear one more person say some sarcastic remark about "so much for global warming" I'm gonna strangle 'em...

Snow Day

Up here in the Wet Corner of the country, our usual precipitation is in the form of rain, with an only occasional "thick rain" (aka snow), so it's with some surprise that I learned this morning that we have had a record amount of snowfall in just one day.

This is it, over 10 inches overnight, and it's been a living freezing hell to drive in. Not for me so much, since I have a Jeep (gotta love that four-wheel drive), but other drivers are pretty much idiots who don't know snow from their pubic hair. Keeping an eye out for morons is pretty much a full-time job in good weather; when it snows all bets are off.

Now there's a freezing rain outside, so I am comfortably ensconced inside, with a chilled bottle of Full Sail Amber and some über cheesy-retro horror movies (Plan 9 From Outer Space, Robot Monster) to watch on the the DVR.

Speaking of which, this morning I wasn't getting very good reception on the TV, so I went outside to take a look at The Dish. It had about three inches of snow plastered to its almost-vertical face, which I was able to dust off fairly easily. But I was impressed with the picture I did get through all the snow, so kudos to Dish Network for their equipment.

So now it's time for the snow to go away. We've managed to get our yearly supply early (it generally snows two or three times per year, about two inches per snowfall, and it's gone in a couple of days) and I'm pleased about that, but come on, enough is enough. At least we haven't lost our electricity. That comes from living on the same power grid as the state capitol grounds and the governor's office, I think -- I'm just sayin'...

My Nonexistent FBI File

Back in the youthful days of the federal Freedom of Information Act I submitted a written request to the FBI to see exactly what they had on me. I'd heard of people getting copies of their "permanent record" only to find that a bunch of things had been "redacted" for reasons of privacy or national security, even to the point of getting a dozen pages (which they had to pay for, by the way) of nothing but blacked-out type.

I was interested in knowing what they had, and I knew that they had to have something. My best friend at the time had been under investigation for several years as a "dangerous radical" and had been set up and busted on a phony dope charge by the local police who were working with the Feebs.

After his arrest, as soon as they got him into custody at the police station the Feebs took over and demanded to know his connection to something called "The White Panther Party" (this was shortly after the FBI raid on the White Panther headquarters in Portland OR) and interrogated him on the current whereabouts of Weather Underground fugitive Bernadine Dohrn.

It was a crazy time, and the Feebs, for all their vaunted "professionalism", didn't fuck around with the subtle niceties of the US Constitution. I guess he was lucky at that, since they didn't mark him for "special rendition" to some godforsaken third world country that didn't have any laws against torture.

So what makes me think that my relationship with this friend caused the Feebs to start a file on me?

Because we were roommates at the time, and this was not one of those thrown-together-in-a-college-dorm thing. We were active in the anti-war movement and living in a small "urban commune", and everyone else in the house was also followed and interrogated and hassled pretty much at the same time.

So when my FOIA request came back with the notation "could not locate records responsive to your request" I had my suspicions that they weren't being entirely forthright about it.

So now, some 35 years later, I ran across this article, Revealed: The FBI's Secretive Practice of "Blackballing" Files over at Truthout.org:

Have you ever filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI and received a written response from the agency stating that it could not locate records responsive to your request?
If so, there's a chance the FBI may have found some documents, but for unknown reasons, the agency's FOIA analysts determined it was not responsive and "blackballed" the file, crucial information the FBI withholds from a requester when it issues a "no records" response.

Okay, so there we go. My file, apparently, was of such a magnitude of a threat to national security that not only were its contents blacked out, but so was the entire file.

So I guess I'm also lucky not to have been "specially rendered" myself... I'm also lucky that I haven't shown up on somebody's "no fly" list.

I'd file a new FOI request, but at this point I don't think I can afford, at 25 cents per page, the cost of it. After all, I am an elderly shut-in on a fixed income these days.

Monday Music Break

Okay, so it's predictable. So what? So sue me...

I was in Vietnam when this song was new, and it still has a lot of personal meaning for me.

MLK Day 2012: Move to Amend

Today is the US national holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and I can't imagine a better way to honor his memory than to pass the proposed 28th Amendment to the US Constitution and settle, once and for all, that corporations are not people and money is not speech.

Over at Move to Amend you can see ways you can get involved and ways you can help to bring about this necessary law to repair our political system.

The proposed amendment is pretty simple:

Move to Amend 28th Amendment
Section 1 [A corporation is not a person and can be regulated]
The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only.
Artificial entities, such as corporations, limited liability companies, and other entities, established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law.
The privileges of artificial entities shall be determined by the People, through Federal, State, or local law, and shall not be construed to be inherent or inalienable.
Section 2 [Money is not speech and can be regulated]
Federal, State and local government shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own contributions and expenditures, for the purpose of influencing in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure.
Federal, State and local government shall require that any permissible contributions and expenditures be publicly disclosed.
The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.
Section 3
Nothing contained in this amendment shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press.

And that's it. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

Check out their website and find the nearest place where you can Occupy the Courts this Friday, January 20th. Maybe I'll see you there...

Romney is a Serial Killer?

Stolen from a Joe Nilsson post on The Facebook, with regard to the Gingrinch attack ad on Romney: "The spot takes Romney's claim that corporations are people, along with his history of buying companies and breaking them apart, to its comedically logical conclusion: Mitt Romney is a serial killer."

Indeed.

The French Connection

We all knew that the Newster was going to pull out all the stops in his charge to topple Mitt Rawmoney, so this shouldn't come as a surprise.

But it does.

Now Newtie is slamming Mittens because he can speak ... French??? Just like (wait for it...) John Kerry.

I don't know what it is about Americans, but we seem to have a visceral dislike of the French, that bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys, with their funny-smelling cheeses and their snotty accents and their superior attitudes... Who the fuck do they think they are, anyway? We can still eat their fried potatoes but we can call them "freedom" fries, thank you very much.

After all, without the US, they would be speaking German now... Never mind the fact that it was the French who helped us out during our own Revolutionary War, and without them we'd all be speaking English now... But I digress...

Come on, Newt. This is the best you can do after getting all Armageddony on us?

Especially since, as a self-described college "professor", you really ought to know better.

Armageddon Outta Here!

The Newtster has just declared Armageddon in South Carolina, on Mitt Rawmoney and the rest of the pack of intellectual defectives in the 2012 GOP race for the White House.

And why shouldn't he? Newt already thinks he's god, and what good is being a god if you can't declare an Armageddon now and then?

It's going to be nothing but scorched earth from Newtie for the next two weeks or so, and to hell (literally) with anyone who stands in his way.

But you gotta ask yourself, if Rusty "I'm-Big-Fat-Drug-Addict" Limpdick, Rude-y "I-Have-No-Lips-But-I-Talk-Anyway" Giuliani , Ron "I'm-Not-A-Racist-No Really" Paul and the Print Propaganda Arm of the GOP, the semi-but-not-really-venerable Wall Street Journal all think you need to dial it down a little, shouldn't you even try to consider that advice?

Not to mention the storied Eleventh Commandment handed down on high from Saint Ronald (trailing clouds of glory, etc.) himself, "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican" (never minding the fact that the sinless saint broke that commandment himself in his fruitless run against Gerald Ford in 1976, which many analysts say guaranteed the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter that year...).

Ah, politics. You gotta love it, especially when the Rethugs start doing what Democrats seemed to have had a virtual patent on for so many elections, which is lock and load and shoot blindly in a circular firing squad.

The "Ministerial Exception"

The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously(!) that people such as teachers in religious schools meet the definition of "ministers" when it comes to having no rights to sue for discrimination.

I wish I knew someone who taught in a religious school (but as you can probably guess, I don't really know anyone like that), because I would talk them into claiming that exception on their income taxes this year. Which means that their entire salary ought to be tax free.

As far as I am concerned, a minister is someone who is ordained (more or less -- different religions have different ways of dealing with that) to "preach" or whatever, minister to the flock, etc. If you are performing a purely secular duty -- such as was the case with the math teacher at the center of this case -- then you are not a minister but just an employee, and if the church that employs you gets Federal money (through the so-called "Faith Based Initiatives" etc.) then they shouldn't be able to sidestep Federal anti-discrimination laws.

In other words, I don't think that churches ought to be able to have it both ways... But what do I know?

Anyway, I am looking forward to a bunch of enterprising church employees using the language of this decision to avoid paying taxes, and we'll be interested in seeing how that goes. Class action suit, anyone?

Is Mitt Romney an "Anchor Baby"?

I had forgotten until the other day that Romney's father, George, an erstwhile 1968 presidential candidate himself, was not actually born in the United States. Instead he was born in the Mormon Colonies in Northern Mexico where his father had fled from Utah, taking his several wives with him, rather than be subjected to the new law forbidding polygamy in Utah. Seemed Utah wanted to become a state so bad that it was willing to persecute members of its own church who had up to then sincerely been following the Word of God...

It turns out that the church elders and their multiple wives were still legally married in the eyes of the Mormon Church, but were lawbreakers in the United States after the church government kowtowed to the rest of the monogynous country and called off what had been held up to that time as an irreversible tenet -- a central "Doctrine" of their belief system.

Ask any Mormon today and he or she will tell you that the church outlawed polygamy oh so many years ago. Not true. The nation outlawed it and the church went along with that and advised all those in plural marriages had to stop it (wink wink). At that a number of Mormon extended families fled the United States and established a series of agricultural colonies in Mexico, all of them within two hundred miles of the US border, where a pliant Mexican government, glad to have all the industrious and hard working Mormons who came with a penchant for making deserts bloom with food and cash crops, allowed them to stay and to flourish while the government at the time basically looked the other way.

At least up until the Mexican Revolution of 1912, with its antireligious tones and tirades, made it too hot for them there and they had to, for the most part, escape back into the US.

So if Old George Romney was born in Mexico and then came to the United States, where the Mittster was born, doesn't that make him Mitt of those so-called "anchor babies" that the right wing keeps fuming about?

Is anyone going to bring that up? And have we ever seen Mitt's own birth certificate? And how do we know that he wasn't born in Mexico himself?

Hey, fair's fair. If Orly Taitz can work herself into a lacquered lather over Barack Obama's real birth certificate, why can't she give Romney the same treatment.

Oh, and that whole polygamy thing with Mormons in general? They still believe in it but are enjoined by the church from practicing it (this is why so many offshoots of the Mormon Church exist, chief among them the notorious Fundamentalst Latter Day Saints, late of serial child molester Warren Jeffs fame), they still believe that no one gets into the highest level of Heaven (there are three in total) without entering into plural marriages, and single women who can't find a husband here on earth can have herself "sealed" -- in a special temple rite, by proxy of course -- to old dead guys who were Mormon Royalty themselves when they were alive, thereby getting to skip the line and get immediately into the Good One. And only those who get into the Good One have the opportunity to get promoted as it were, and to become gods themselves where they can create and rule over their own planets...

I am not making this up. Check it out for yourself and see if I am right.

RUFKM???

I just ran across this commercial:

From the look of it, I would have guessed it was something out of the 1940s. It's as if someone asked, "How many negative stereotypes about Black people can we jam into 40 seconds?" and then went ahead and did it.

It surprised me to learn that this was actually an advert from the 1980s! Granted, it is from the UK, whose racist attitudes have always been much more upfront, more in your grille, than Americans, but still...

I am sorely tempted to add my own soundtrack in which I imitate the leading Rethug presidential contenders talking about those uppity Negroes.

I'm tempted, but as everyone knows, I am also lazy. I'll leave it up to someone else to do it...

My Choice for the GOP Ticket

Let's face it, the frontrunners are all pretty much a bunch of losers who couldn't come up with a campaign slogan if their trust funds depended on it. And can you wait until the dust settles and they all have to kiss and make up and make googoo sounds at each other, after going for jugular in nearly every debate. Wanna watch Professor Gingrinch suck up to his sworn enemy Mitt Romney after Romney gets the nomination? Well, actually, me too, but it won't be pretty. And that's my I am throwing my not inconsiderable support behind a couple of alternative candidates who just happen to have perfect names for the 2012 Republican nomination:

I said it before, way back in 2009, and I'm saying it again, Blunt-Boehner in 2012. Roy Blunt from Missouri and John Boehner from Ohio. Both card-carrying rethugs, both with names that will make history. Come on guys, what about it?

That slogan alone is worth the price of admission. I'm probably going to go over to Makestickers.com and have a couple printed up.

Romney: Another Chickenhawk

I've always found it kind of odd that Mitt Romney never quite managed to find the time to serve his country in the US Armed forces. After all, Mitt is of an age (born in 1947) that, when the 1960s were in full flower and the flower of American youth was called to serve and die, that he really should have been called to serve.

Of course he was on a mission for the Moron Mormon church for two years in, of all places, France! How many Frenchmen can be wrong? All of them who fall for the cheese-pie-in-the-sky fantasies of the Mormons...

Okay, cheap shot -- everyone knows that I don't hate the French. But I do hate most Mormons and I hate most Mormon missionaries (okay, hate is a strong word for what is really a kind of special pity for a naive bunch of brainwashed children) and I especially hate chickenhawks.

So why is it that Mitt, even though he was pretty public in demonstrating in support of the draft at Stanford(!) in 1966, was never sent that infamous "greeting" that a lot of us got when we were afforded that "opportunity" to serve our Uncle Sam?

The article linked above seems to conclude that his status as a "missionary of god" got him a permanent exemption, but I know that this is a faulty conclusion. It got him a deferment only for the 24 months that he was "laboring" in the mission field, but after that he was -- or should have been -- 1A with his local draft board again.

When I was an unwilling employee of Uncle Sam myself, I was in training with this creepy crewcut geekezoid -- he looked a lot like that Gary Larson kid with the black glasses and flattop haircut -- from Idaho who was a "returned missionary", having served his two years in Germany. He was, like me, a draftee, but he was also a scion of Mormon Royalty from several Utah generations (you'd recognize the name immediately if you knew anything about Mormon Royalty). Back then, I thought that most Mormons were a patriotic lot and wouldn't consider avoiding the draft.

Still, when something over 80% of my basic training company -- all draftees, of course -- got sent to advanced infantry training at Fort Polk Louisiana (prep school for Vietnam) Mister Mormon Royalty managed to snag himself a plum quasi-diplomatic liaison assignment to ... Germany. All because he spoke (sort of) German.

Which brings us full circle back to Chickenhawk Romney. If he didn't get that deferment because he was on a mission, then why didn't he get drafted?

Could it be that it was because his father, George Romney, who himself had avoided the WWII draft himself by making cars in Detroit, was the governor of Michigan?

And even though our Mittsy was in favor of the war, he just didn't want to dirty his own hands with it; his father, when he tried to run for president (yes, it's true) in 1968, came out against the war and said that, when he was for it before he was against it, he'd been "brainwashed" by the generals. Which history shows was his knell of doom...

Politics is a dirty business, but it ought to be at least a public dirty business. Mitt Romney needs to clear the air, straighten out the record, and come clean as to why, if he really supported the war, he didn't do anything personally to help win it. Like enlist. Or like allow himself to get drafted.

But I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting for it. The fucker won't even make public his goddam tax returns. He's not going to address a half-century old question as to why he, despite having every opportunity to do so, did not serve his country in the Vietnam War.

Georgia Trusts in God

...all others pay cash. Sorry, I couldn't resist the cheap joke.

But seriously folks... The state of Georgia is on track to make all cars have license plates that state, boldly enough, "In God We Trust". Unless you are some kind of commie-leaning atheist and you don't trust in god, in which case you can pay some extra bucks to opt out of the program and have your county's name, emblazoned on a peel-off sticker, to paste over the motto.

You may also recall that our Congress, in the midst of a financial crisis unknown for nearly a century, chose to spend a day revisiting the issue of our national motto. Which is, curiously enough, also spelled "In God We Trust".

And is has been since the 1950s, when the old motto, "E Pluribus Unum", was overthrown. Too foreign-sounding, I guess...

Anyway, to get back to Georgia. I suppose there won't be any ... untoward ... reactions against those who opt out of wearing their religion on their sleeves. Like no noisy neighbors in sheets congregating on your front lawn and using a handy wooden relic as a flaming lantern to light their way and enlighten yours...

This is the one of the stupidest ideas to come out of a part of the country already well known for stupid ideas. It'll likely become law (who wants to come up for re-election this year when your opponent will cite your vote against god in his campaign literature?), and it'll also most likely be struck down by one of those activist judges on the supreme court of Georgia, or in the court of appeals, etc.

I guess it's easier to wear your religion on your sleeve -- or your bumper -- than actually, I don't know, really practicing it. I guess that whole "love your neighbor" and "help the poor" stuff kind of gets a little messy in real life.

Yawn, it's Romney

After all the hoopla and the millions of bucks thrown into Iowa by all of the candidates, you'd think that it would be more exciting than this.

But it isn't. Romney wins, which is what everyone who has a little toe firmly grounded in reality has been saying all along.

Now the truly entertaining candidates (Bachmann, Gingrich) are nursing their stubbed toes and mouthing platitudes such as, "It's not over till it's over" and shit like that.

The surprising-to-some showing of Rick Santorum in second place just goes to show you the value of "retail politics" -- Little Ricky made more in-person town hall appearances in Iowa than there are towns to have a town hall in. Let's see him try that on the national stage.

Ron Paul, of course, the true Republican maverick, appeals to the more disaffected voters, but his campaign is really really going no where, so in the end it will be Romney who gets the nomination and then gets the unenviable opportunity to be kicked in the ass by the re-emergent Barack Obama.

As long as there is no October Surprise in the offing...

The Return of the OPOV Book of the Month

Starting off the New Year right, I've chosen Secular City Limits by Matthew Barron as my new Book of the Month.

Polemic fiction has a long and honored -- and sometimes dishonored (Atlas Shrugged by wackjob Ayn Rand comes to mind) -- history in the literary world. In the long run it's very hard to pull off with any finesse. And that is why I was pleasantly surprised with this book. The author has a definite point of view and he's not afraid of making it known, but not at the expense of story and character.

At some unstated time in the near future, the United States becomes a "Christian Nation", with none other than the old theocrat himself, Pat Robertson, at the helm as president. The main characters of the story, a single mother and her fatherless son, plus a couple of friends, undertake to escape from Indiana ("Praise Jesus") through Ohio ("Praise God") on their way to the promised land, a near-mythical place in the old Northeast called Secular City, where the theocrats have not taken over, religion is left up to the individual, and peace and democracy rule. That's the belief that Helena and her son clutch onto to get them across one-third of the country from their home in Indiana.

Their struggles along the way provide ample fodder for the church-state-separation polemicist in Barron, but the work is never didactic, never preachy, and the dialog never unbelievable. It's really difficult to write dialog with a political point of view that still sounds natural, that doesn't sound phony, but Barron pulls it off with ease.

We have a set of characters, briefly drawn yet fully realized, with whom we can identify and sympathize, and some bully-like antagonists that are easy to hate, but none of the characters come off as cardboard cutouts.

Highly recommended for fans of church-state separation and for fans of dystopian fiction.

God I Miss Herman Cain.

"If you cain't get a pizza for $9.99, it's yo' fault!"

With Cain out of the race for the Rethug nomination, those of us over on the left are beside ourselves. Such a rich gold mine for political snark just doesn't come along every day. Last summer I was also hoping Sarah "Half-Governor" Palin was going to finally, after weeks of dithering, throw her hat in the ring after all. For someone who sees comedy in pretty much everything and lives for the chance to make fun of someone in Rethug politics, it's almost more than I can take.

And of course over in the wingnuttery, the talking heads are blaming, if you can believe it, the Democrats for engaging in a "high tech lynching" by "driving" Cain out of the race.

Are you fucking kidding me? We were praying that he'd stay in and become the eventual nominee. Obama would have had a field day totally demolishing that overgrown serial molester in head-to-head debates.

Now the best we have left if Newt Gingrich, who remains, as Paul Krugman called him, "a stupid man's idea of what a smart man should sound like"... I can't wait for him to debate Obama. Right after he explains away that huge payout he had to make in response to the negative findings against him for his ethical lapses while he was still Speaker of the House. Or was that Spanker of the House? We'll never know for sure, since there's no way he will get to be the nominee. As soon as the dust settles, we'll end up with Romney.

Oh, there will still be some easy jokes about him and many embarrassing gaffes on his part, but he just doesn't carry the kind low-hanging fruit that the others do. It'll be a little harder for us out here in Snarkland. Don't worry though, we'll soldier through anyway -- it's a calling to public service.

A Death in the Family

Posting has been light since before Xmas and here's one of the reasons why. Long time readers of this blog know that I used to have a regular feature called Friday Cat Blogging, back when the cats were younger and still willing to pose for cute photos. A couple of weeks before Xmas the oldest cat, Lucy (that's her on the left), came down with some illness that she found impossible to shake, even after numerous trips to the vet; she had also developled some rare kind of feline diabetes. Finally, on Xmas Day, she was vocally in obvious distress, her temperature was dropping almost exponentially and we decided that it was finally time that she Walk the Green Mile. So we took her to the emergency animal clinic and she was put peacefully to "sleep", lying in my arms and trying to purr.

"It was just a cat", people might say. Well, she might have been a cat, but she wasn't "just" a cat. We had her in our lives for 14 years, since she was an eight-week kitten, and she provided a joy and happiness to us that was way beyond being "just a cat". I had a special bond with her that I hadn't had with any of the other animals with whom I've shared my life over the last 66 years, and she is dearly missed.

And now we are dealing with Dottie (on the right), our sole remaining pet, now an only child, who has been poking around the house to try to find where Lucy is hiding.

She will -- and we will -- eventually get over the loss, but right now there is a hole in our hearts where Lucy used to be.

Merry Fucking Christmas

Okay, I take it back. I will wish you all a "Merry Fucking Christmas", courtesy of South Park:

See you all next week. Or next year. I'm kinda getting used to being totally lazy...

Still Alive

I had lunch today with my usual "Friday Posse", one of whom is a faithful reader of this blog. He was concerned by my previous post and wondering if I'd even show up today.

Well, you can all relax. I'm still alive. I'm just taking a break from posting. This will likely last until after the Xmas holidays.

Have a great holiday everyone. And no, as a dedicated foot soldier in the phony Faux News "War on Christmas", I will not wish you a Merry Christmas...

I'm Still Here

I've more or less recovered from the "chill on my liver", but it's still freakin' cold here...

I've got some "family dynamics" issues going on, so it'll be some light posting for a while.

Again, thanks for reading.

Occupying A Chill on My Liver

"A chill on my liver..." Film buffs will recognize that funny phrase from the delightfully quirky 1953 film Beat the Devil, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley (playing the role that Sydney Greenstreet would have played had he still been acting), Peter Lorre and Bernard Lee (who would go on to widespread recognition with his appearances as "M" in the James Bond movies). If you haven't seen it, rent it from Netflix, or better yet, buy it from Amazon. I guarantee you'll want to watch it more than once.

I was out all day Monday at Olympia's Capitol Campus for the massive protest by the Occupy people, many of whom had come down from neighboring Seattle for the event, and I even saw one guy from Michigan there. It was a cold day and I stood outsideway too long, with the result that I caught a chill on my liver and haven't felt good since then.

I did of course manage to miss the arrests -- some 40 in all -- that took place, having been on the steps of one of the legislative office buildings some distance away from the excitement while many of my cohorts stormed into a revenue meeting being held by some legislators. I didn't go in myself because of some residual claustrophobia which I brought back from Vietnam and which rears its ugly head whenever I get surrounded by a large number of people in a confined space, like a hallway, even if they are largely people who are on my side. Hiding for your life while hunkered down in a very narrow sandbagged bunker full of fat and hungry rats while mortar rounds and rockets are landing next to where you are can do that to a guy...

Our issues? The usual things, the banksters, the 1%, the disparate income and wealth distribution, etc. etc., but there were also a massive number of teachers protesting the proposed cuts to education, home health care workers protesting the proposed rollbacks to their programs, union workers protesting calls by Republicans to do an Ohio-and-Wisconsin-like dismantling of collective bargaining, and many more, including a bunch of others like me, who don't have any particular dog in the fight (I'm retired and the state can't really do much to me over my retirement pay or my non-existent working conditions...) but who wanted to stand up and be counted anyway.

It was a long day and I got tired and, as I say, chilled by being outdoors in the cold when I wasn't used to it. I can't imagine those poor people having to bear up in it while they are living in those flimsy "occupy" tents down by the water.

Anyway, I'm not feeling so good now; I think I am coming down with something. I'll likely take some more time off to rest and recuperate. See you back here in a few days.

In the meantime, keep up the good fight! Find an Occupy event near you and join it. Make your voice heard against the deafening roar of the Police State pepper cannons and the inane prattling of the bubbleheaded cheerleaders on Faux "News".

Enough Whining Already

Jeez, you can't go through a day, it seems, without being hit alongside the head by this or that "Christian" group whining about being an oppressed minority that is systematically "persecuted" for their beliefs. Shut the fuck up already. You are enabling this culture of victimhood for yourselves without even knowing what a true victim is. Jews in Nazi Germany? True Victims. College-educated professionals in Pol Pot's Cambodia? True Victims. You American Christians? Uh, not so much...

Rob Boston, of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (of which I am a proud member) has a great piece over at Alternet which discusses why, in more reasonable terms than I can muster when it comes to these people, the Christian Right needs to just STFU:

1. Of the 10 largest religious advocacy groups in Washington, seven take the Religious Right line on most issues.
Five of the top-10 groups (Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Home School Legal Defense Fund, Focus on the Family’s Citizenlink and the Traditional Values Coalition) are Religious Right organizations.
. . .
2. These organizations raise a ton of money.
The Pew report lists budget figures for each group examined. The numbers are staggering. In 2008, the Family Research Council, which, since the demise of the Christian Coalition has become the leading D.C.-based Religious Right group, took in more than $14 million.
. . .
3. These organizations enjoy incredible access to legislators.
Most advocacy groups woo lawmakers with money (through allied political action committees) or by implying that there are votes to be had among their respective constituencies. Some far-right religious groups can offer both.
. . .

And there's more. Go read the entire article and get up to speed on the Religious Right's false equivalencies when it comes to "persecution".

You'd think they'd be ashamed.

But once again, you'd be wrong.

Monday Music Break

Here's our Monday Music Break for this week, Zoot Suit Riots from 1997, by the singularly-named Cherry-Poppin' Daddies:

The historical Zoot Suit Riots took place in 1943 mostly in greater Los Angeles. Racially-motivated attacks by sailors and Marines against young Mexican-American males led to social unrest and rioting, and the whole thing might have become a forgotten part of history were it not for things like this song, and the play and subsequent 1981 film Zoot Suit, both productions featuring the great Edward James Olmos, which examined the "pacheco" culture and milieu of 1940s Los Angeles.

Monday Music Break

Here is the great Leonard Cohen's "Democracy". Once again, it just feels right. And with this post I'm off for a week for the holiday. See you all next week.

A Salute to Dorli Rainey

Here's Keith Olbermann's Wednesday interview with Dorli Rainey 84 year old pepper sprayed by Seattle cops:

This is amazing and appalling. She is a Holocaust survivor who can remember Joseph Goebbels.

I noted this week when the Seattle cops sprayed her. Here's the rest of the story.

Are we really turning into a police state? It's sure starting to look like it...

Torturing Bachmann

After mouthing off that she wouldn't have a problem with waterboarding someone, Michelle "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann was asked by the Des Moines Iowa Register's editorial board if she would be willing to go through waterboarding so she could speak about it more knowledgeably.

Ha, like that's gonna happen. You already know the answer. Bachmann replied that it "would be absurd to have the President of the United States submit themselves to waterboarding"...

Okay, despite the obvious grammatical error there, something else more important is going on. I hate to break the news to her since she apparently considers the election in the bag (after all, god told her to run), but she is not the president.

And never will be. So the question is still a valid one. Is she willing to undergo the "discomfort" of being waterboarded?

Not so absurd now that she's just plain US Representative Bachmann, is it?

Here's Navy veteran, former professional wrestler, erstwhile movie actor, and ex-governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura -- who appears to know something about waterboarding:

Another example is the eccentric former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who has discussed how he was waterboarded as part of his Navy SEAL training (which the military does in order to teach its elite troops to resist torture techniques). Ventura famously declared: “I’ll put it to you this way: You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”

Jeez, I'd pay money -- a lot of money -- to be able to watch that.

Speaking of money, Michelle is missing out on the chance to raise a lot of it for her flagging campaign. All she'd have to do, in the interests of truth, i.e., proving her point that waterboarding is only "uncomfortable", is to host a pay-per-view event on cable television of her actually being waterboarded.

Even I would donate to her campaign in those circumstances.

What about it, Michelle? You've been torturing the American people long enough. Now it's your turn.

Think of the money.

Eat Your Vegetables

Everyone remember when Saint Ronald declared that ketchup was a vegetable? There was outrage on both sides of the aisle over that stumble (back when some RepubliCONs still had a soul).

Well, move over ketchup. There's a bigger gun in town:


Your congress, for lack of having anything better to do than say, reaffirm our stupid national motto, like maybe working on something for the economy and creating all those jobs that John Boner promised us nearly a year ago, has decided to declare that pizza is a vegetable!

The upside? Now I can happily sit in front of the tube and munch down on my giant extra-cheese-meat-lovers pizza (see photo) and tell She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed that I am eating my vegetables. And with a couple of bottles of Full Sail Amber (after all, what's pizza without beer?), I'm drinking them too!

The Crush the Occupy Movement: A City-by-City Breakdown

Here, from the UK's The Guardian, is a breakdown of the police actions to crush the Occupy movement in six US cities, New York, Portland OR, Oakland, Salt Lake City, Denver and Atlanta.

Read the whole story, which expertly gives a little history and a brief but incisive description of police-state actions to shut down each of the protests.

And then ask yourself why our own CPM/SCLM* has not done something similar to this, to bring into focus the fascist actions of the uniformed minions of the wealthy.

One more thing: Seattle was not mentioned in the UK story, but last night Seattle cops indiscriminately peppersprayed a crowd and attacked a 19-year-old pregnant woman and an 84-year-old woman.

Is this really the kind of country we want to be?

--

[*CPM/SCLM = Capitalist Pig Media/So-Called Liberal Media]

Olbermann Nails It to Bloomberg!

I always love it when KO launches into one of his crazy-seeming rants, and today he absolutely cuts no slack for NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He gets in high dudgeon and it is definitely worth a look:

Jeez, get 'em champ!

Ever Wonder if You're a Fascist?

No, probably not, since my literally dozens of readers are all smart people who are the correct side of history.

That IBIL* of yours, though? The one that's coming over to wreck your Thanksgiving Day dinner yet again for the tenth year in a row? Ever wonder about him being a fascist? Come on, you know you have.

Well, thanks to the always valuable Addicting Info, here's a checklist to see if someone's a fascist.

1. You are obsessed with national power and pride and believe your country doesn’t have to follow the rules and shouldn’t ever apologize for doing things that are wrong. You think your nation can do whatever it wants.
2. You believe in the rule of the few, election rigging, political decisions being made by a select group of officials behind closed doors, embrace the informal and unregulated exercise of political power, arbitrary deprivation of civil liberties, and little tolerance for meaningful opposition.
3. You believe in survival of the fittest, an every man for himself mentality that causes you to believe that poor people and sick people are weak and must be punished. You think rich people are strong because they are wealthy and that they should rule us. You also your race in superior to all others.
4. You use the media as a political propaganda machine to target a specific audience and to push your agenda on others. You make sure the media demonizes your opponents and takes your side on nearly every issue. You use your propaganda machine to play on the fears of others.
5. You are obsessed with security, and war. You feed this obsession by spending trillions of dollars building up a large military force and are willing to sacrifice domestic programs your people count on to keep your military huge. You start unnecessary and costly wars and you are paranoid of other nations.

And that's just the first five! Go read the entire list of 18 items, and when that dude asks you to pass the potatoes, you can scream, "YOU INVADED POLAND YOU NAZI PIG!!!"

No, wait. That's likely not such a good idea in the long run... Better to just mash the entire bowl of mashed potatoes into his face.

No, wait. That's probably not good either. Maybe you should just pass the fucking potatoes and at your first opportunity escape into the next room and the television set that will undoubtedly have a football game on to calm you down...

--

[*IBIL -- Idiot Brother-In-Law]

Does Anyone Really Believe This?

In the latest event of "victimhood" a waitress at a suburban Chicagoland Outback Steakhouse has prompted some Teabagger "outrage" over the weekend because she was allegedly fired for wearing a Tea Party "Don't Tread On Me" bracelet to work.

Here's the Huffpost story on this poor girl:

Tea Party members gathered outside a suburban Chicago Outback Steakhouse over the weekend after a waitress at the restaurant claimed she was fired for wearing a Tea Party bracelet to work.

Megan Geller, 23, claims a couple dining at the Crystal Lake, Ill. steakhouse was offended by her "Don’t Tread On Me" bracelet in early October. They allegedly complained to management, and she was fired shortly after, Geller's mother told the Northwest Herald.

Tonya Franklin, Geller's mother, told the Herald that she gave her daughter the yellow bracelet after receiving it at a Tea Party event. Franklin joined protesters in calling the firing a violation of Geller's free speech.

“They stirred up the wrong hornet’s nest and messed with the wrong mama,” Franklin told the Herald. “When mamas get mad, mamas get to work.”

"Free speech"? Really? You're gonna try to go with that?

I'd like to wake little Megan -- and especially that shrew of a mother of hers -- up to the fact that this is not a "free speech" issue. Sorry, girls. Only the government can be guilty of suppressing free speech. Not an individual, not a business, and not even the worst imaginable management.

Little Megan needs to suck it up and understand that when you sell your time to an employer in this society, you are little more than a paid slave. Absent any kind of union protection (which I am sure that she doesn't have and, given her mother's Teabagger proclivities, shouldn't even want...), you work at the pleasure and the will of your employer, and if the Outback Restaurant doesn't want you wearing something that could prove disruptive to their business, you'd better do what they say and take it off.

But of course Outback has a different slant on things:

Company officials, however, told the Associated Press that Geller was inattentive to to diners at two tables, and that if the bracelet had been an issue, they would have asked her to take it off. Management also said that Geller yelled at them when they spoke to her about complaints from diners.

Ah ha!

Now I've never been one to carry a brief for national chains of any kind, but it only stands to reason that management would have asked her -- told her -- to take it off before they fired her. But this seems to me to be a clear case of a whiny-assed little girl who won't do what she is told, doesn't pay attention to her work and is rude to her bosses. I don't care what business you work in, you can't do that and expect to walk away from it without consequences.

Another case of fake victimhood. I call bullshit on it, and I call bullshit on Megan and I call bullshit on her mother.

Brilliant Short Films

Hey, as much as I try, it can't all be political snark and angry diatribes. Here are a couple of terrific YouTube videos of short films to get Tuesday off to a good start. Both of these won several prestigious cinema awards, and deservedly so.

First is the brilliant 2002 film, Ten Minutes. Watch that long take in the middle, and don't get confused when it suddenly looks like it's a different movie. It isn't...

And the second is Spain's heartwarming The Story of a Sign from 2008. Guaranteed to make you smile, even if you think that you've had a bad day.

Monday Music Break

Here's Buffalo Springfield in 1969 singing their noted 60s anti-war youth anthem, For What It's Worth:

Once again, it just seems right: Cops are beating up on #Occupy_Everything protesters all across the nation. It's wet and it's cold and these people are being scooped out of their tents and getting their heads smashed with police batons. They are being depicted in the CPM* as being an unruly mob, a bunch of louts with no real goals.

Meanwhile take a look over at College Park Pennsylvania at the Penn State students rioting -- actually rioting -- in the streets over the firing of the serial-child-molester-enabling football coach Joe Paterno, an asshole who ought to go to fucking jail for not turning that dirty dickwad prepubescent-boy-butt-fucker into the police immediately!

You didn't hear those complaisant lickspittle corporation Koch-sucking media assholes bitching about a real riot, with actual and substantial property damage, did you? Yeah, I'm mostly talking to you, Faux "News" but you're not the only target of my scorn. Everyone in the mainstream media seems to yapping the same meme.

Jesus. It is a funny world.

Yeah, "there's somethin's happenin' here", all right. And it isn't good

--

[*CMP = Capitalist Pig Media]

Why I Still Hate Richard Nixon

You all remember Tricky Dick Nixon, the only US president to resign in disgrace. Well, it wasn't for nothing that he was called "Tricky Dick".

Now we learn, by kind of a roundabout way, what had only been hinted at for the last 43 years. In the last days of Nixon's ultimately successful 1968 campaign for the presidency, he opened some back-channel communications with the Republic of Vietnam's then president Nguyen van Thieu,with the aim of keeping Thieu away from the Paris Peace Conference, then in full swing with a good possibility to finally bring a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam question.

If Lyndon Johnson had been able to complete that "hail mary" pass and get a peace accord in the last few days of the campaign, Vice President Hubert Humphrey would likely have been able to capitalize on the resulting boost for the Democrats and won the election. As it was he lost by only 500,000 votes, which was barely a whisper on the vote meter.

But no, Tricky Dick and his evil crew could never allow that. All they had to do was delay Thieu for three days or so, no peace accord, and no bumphrey for Humphrey.

And that's what happened. I'm not saying that Humphrey would have been a great president. Hell, I could barely stand the guy myself, but anything would have been better, as it turned out, than Richard Fucking Nixon.

I will admit that, to my everlasting shame and chagrin, I actually voted for Nixon myself, from Vietnam. I was young and stupid in those days (as opposed to what I am now, which is old and stupid) and, for some unknown reason, I actually thought that he really did have that "secret plan" to end the war.

Turns out he did. It only took another five years and twice as many dead Americans -- and who knows how many dead Vietnamese? -- for it to come to fruition.

And I have never voted for a Republican since then.

Veterans Day

Time out from my regular snark to wish all of my fellow veterans a happy Veterans Day. We are the REAL 1%.

Thank you for your service, my brothers and sisters. Welcome home.

Back from Americans United

I'm back but feeling kind of look-what-the-cat-dragged-in. It seems to take a lot out of me any more to make those transcontinental plane trips. One of those inevitable signs of becoming a "Wise Elder". Plus it didn't help that on the Denver to Seattle leg, I was forced to sit in a middle seat, my least favorite spot on a crowded airliner. Fortunately that's what they make Xanax, $8 drinks and iPods for...

My trip to DC, which you may recall, was for the annual meeting of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an organization which I am proud to be a member of and whose praises I have often sung on this blog. As always, I come away reinvigorated after spending a couple of days with Barry Lynn, our executive director, my counterparts (i.e., other chapter leaders and regular members) from across the country and with my fellow members of AU's National Advisory Council.

A special high point of this year was meeting and listening to Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who was there to receive AU's Person of the Year award for all the work that he does in furthering the cause of church-state separation in the military. I was astonished to learn a couple things about Mikey and the FFRF. The first is that his organization is so small in terms of actual people doing the work, and second, which is even more astounding, that they currently have over 25,000 active cases in the four branches of the military service. That means that over 25,000 active duty or recently separated service members have complained to the MMRF about the illegal proselytizing activities from not only chaplains but also their chain-of-command superiors.

Mikey is a hard-charging in-your-face kind of guy, and that's a good thing because he said that it usually takes only a phone call to straighten a lot of these issues out. He's not afraid to make threats to the offenders, including lawsuits, and that most-feared tactic, publicly calling them out. Nobody likes bad publicity, not even the Jesus Freaks in the military. Given that, it didn't come as a surprise that he regularly receives some serious death threats and that he travels with a group of security guys -- bodyguards, really -- who look as stern and alert as any Secret Service agent as they constantly scanned the room as he spoke.

Another high point was being able to meet, listen to, and honor recent high school graduate Corwyn Schultz, who led the fight against school prayer at his Texas high school. This case was taken up by Americans United and is still working its way through the appeals process, with the likely result that it will eventually end up on the US Supreme Court. It was an honor to meet him and hear his inspiring story of the "lone wolf" standing up to the forces of religious fascism.

Why did he keep at it in the face of what you can imagine was some Big Time peer pressure and ostracization? In his own words: "I'm stubborn."

Corwyn received AU's new Religious Liberty Award, which will be an annual award to a young person who is willing to make a principled stand for what he or she believes is right.

See the story of the awards along with photos on the MMRF page.

Pardon me if I launch into another "commercial" -- If you are already a member of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, good on you. If you are not, please consider becoming a member. It's fast, it's easy, and it's inexpensive. As little as $25 will get you a year's membership along with our mostly-monthly publication, Church and State. If you live in an area with a local chapter, you can always contact someone there for more information and an opportunity to meet with like-minded people where you live.

Don't delay. Do it today. With three presidential candidates claiming that god told them to run for the office, we have to push back. (For the Republicans who read this blog, I know you don't believe in simple arithmetic, but trust me, the odds are really stacked against at least two of them actually getting The Word from that abstract old man in the sky.)

A Congressman With Guts

A congressman with guts. Given the current bunch of rethugs who are running the country like something out of the Three Stooges meets the Rocky Horror Picture Show, that's what we need. And that congressman with guts would be Florida's Alan Grayson, who has just launched his bid to return to congress next year.

Here's a video of Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva asking for help for Grayson:

Please drop by Grayson's A Congressman With Guts website and kick loose a few bucks for the campaign. We need more strong progressive voices in congress, and Grayson is exactly the kind of kick-ass-and-take-names guy we need in there.

- - -

Sidebar: I'll be gone to DC for the annual meeting of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, so I won't be posting again until the middle of next week. In the meantime, keep the faith and hang in there.

Coulter: Our Negroes are Better Than Your Negroes

mAnn Coulter is at it again. Check this out:

Did you know that Coulter has a new book out, so she's making the rounds of the Wingnut Media to flog it?

“That’s why our blacks are so much better than their blacks,” Coulter said. “To become a black Republican you don’t just roll into it. You’re not going with the flow. You have fought against probably your family members, probably your neighbors, you have thought everything out and that’s why we have very impressive blacks in our party.”
“Our blacks?” ….oops, sorry. Thought the calendar just rolled back to 1861.
. . .
Perhaps Coulter would like to debate a fellow Republican on this. How about former Republican Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — herself on book tour. She was asked about Cain in an interview to be broadcast Wednesday on CBS’ “Early Show.” Her advice: Don’t play the race card.

Go ahead and read the whole story and come away shaking your head at the over-the-top musings of the Republican Party's only known transexual yapping mouth.

Jeez, I'd love it if she just went away, and took Herman "I Don't Know" Cain with her.

"Don't Be the Weird One"

That's the advice given to the speakers at this year's so-called Value Voters Summit, put on by the über Religious Right wackjob-controlled Family Research Council. When you have an overload of speakers such as Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul haranguing the Pavlovian-dog-whistled crowds to froth their mouths over the horrors of secular society, "humans evolved from monkeys", the need to put god back into the public square, and the requirement that the next president to be a "born again" Christian, I think that the "don't be the weird one" admonition got wadded up and punted out the window on the Wednesday before the meeting.

In the grand scheme of things, those of us out here on the secular frontier tend to look at clowns like these with a measure of humor, as a source of fairly harmless amusement. But it could take just one ginned-up "October Surprise" for one of those wackjobs to spring to the presidency, and if they drag a republican majority in both houses of congress with them, then it suddenly wouldn't be all that amusing.

The Washington-based staff of Americans United for Separation of Church and State regularly attends these things, and I have to give them kudos for sticking their necks and their hands into a den of rabid wolverines for a couple of days each year. They probably feel like a handful of popsickle sticks in a room full of chainsaws. But good on them for doing it, and bringing back the word on what the Religious Right is really up to.

It's not pretty.

Barry W. Lynn, an ordained minister, is the Executive Director of Americans United, and he had this to say about this year's fest:

I used to believe that as I got older and gained more and more life experience, fewer things would bother me. Maybe I’m not aging after all, then, because going to the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit here in Washington was bothersome – as well as bizarre, boggling of the mind and baffling.
...“Government should not get between a patient and his doctor.” Right on! And, in predictable fashion, the speech would move later into an anti-abortion message with speakers vowing to stop every abortion or virtually every one.
But wait – couldn’t this be construed as government, the criminal law even, getting between a patient and her doctor? Perhaps the pronoun really does matter, or the level of hypocrisy is stunning.
Here’s another ironic twist to the essential message of this group: They talked about fealty to the “Constitution” (a version they apparently found in their sock drawer) constantly, but went into the stratosphere with glee when U.S. Rep. Ron Paul announced that all of his positions come from the Bible – military policy, tax policy and (of course) abortion policy. Some weird interpretation of constitutional rights is secondary to the belief that all policy matters need a biblical basis.

Read the whole thing. It's Barry's current monthly commentary for November in the organization's publication, Church & State, which is available on the website in its entirety at http://www.au.org/church-state/november-2011-church-state.

Be sure to read Assistant Editor Rob Boston's Bombast, Bigotry and the Bible and Unholy Harangue: Summit Speakers Hit New Heights of Extremism;
Examples:

U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) ...also freely rewrote American history. According to the congressman, the Declaration of Independence was written under divine guidance, and God “moved the Founding Fathers around like men on a chessboard. I believe this country was planned and built by his hand.”
Glenn Beck, former Fox News personality. Beck unleashed a bombastic tirade that careened wildly from ominous claims of societal conflict due to the Wall Street protestors and an ongoing “race war” to assertions that politics doesn’t matter as much as service to your fellow Americans.

It is difficult to characterize Beck’s rant or summarize his main themes – there weren’t any. A few sips could be taken from his stream of consciousness, however: Beck dislikes it when young people take out loans to pay for college and then complain because they experience difficulty paying them back. He mentioned this more than once. At one point, he recommended that if young people can’t afford college, they should just go to “the free public library. It worked for me.”
Doomsday prophesies also littered the Beck rant. He conjured up a veritable zombie Apocalypse involving hordes of advancing Wall Street occupiers.
“The violent left is coming to our streets, all of our streets, to smash, to tear down, to kill, to bankrupt, to destroy,” Beck told the crowd. “It will be global in nature and global in its scope. I said these things two years ago, and I was mocked and ridiculed.”

Again, read the whole thing. AU is the one organization whose entire goal is to maintain the wall of separation that exists between churches and government.

I am proud to be a member and I encourage you to become one as well. Study the Americans United website, read some of things we do and the things we stand for, and please consider joining us. Dues can be as little as $18.00 per year, you won't have to go meetings unless you want to, you won't have to take any actions if you don't want to, but no matter what level of participation you want to engage in, you will be helping a terrific organization as it fights back against the dark forces of the religious right.

I have been a member for many years, and this coming weekend I will get to go back to Washington DC for our yearly meeting. It's always a time to get some great new training, meet some great fellow AU members from all over the country, meet some of the outstandingly excellent people on the staff of the national office, and mainly have a lot of fun. After the sessions, there's a lot of "hanging out" time with a bunch of smart intelligent people who are in complete agreement with me on the topic of the separation of church and state.

I had to miss it last year, and the fact that I didn't go felt as though I'd torn an important piece of fabric out of the seat of my pants.

An Embarrassment

Heeeere's Perry! Take a look at this video and you'll see a rambling and semi-coherent Rick Perry at a speech in New Hampshire.

Is this really the person we want to represent the United States? At least Bush was a dry drunk. Perry looks like that guy you meet in a bar, who is just over the edge of inebriation and thinks he's the life of the party when he's just another dipshit with dipsomania.

Stick a fork in him. He's done.

The Daily Show and Rightwing "Science"

It's a full episode on the Daily Show website, but I couldn't find a shorter and embeddable one.

It's the Oct 26 show with guest Lisa Randall. Watch it in full if you like (it's worth it), but do be sure to watch the Aasif Mandvi segment starting at about 05:38, wherein he tongue-in-cheekily demolishes a moronic woman who is pretending to be intelligent and educated.

Aasif: "So it's not fair that surgeons are the only ones who get to perform brain operations, then?"

Idiot Woman: "That's right, now you see the problem with science."

Farnsworth: "Aiyyyyyyeeeee!" Hits forehead with palm smack, raps head on keyboard.

Monday Music Break

Since it is Halloween, I thought I would do something themed, but everything seems like a predictable cliché. Bobby "Boris" Pickett's The Monster Mash. Michael Jackson's Thriller? I mean come on. Been there, seen that.

That's why today's Music Break Monday is something really scary: The Archies' Sugar Sugar. What is scary about it is that it made it to Number One on the Billboard Top 100 for 1969. It's scary that such great songs as The Rolling Stones Honky Tonk Woman was only #3, and Creedence's Green River and Bad Moon Rising came in at only #35 and #36.

This was 1969. Nixon's first year as president. The War in Vietnam claimed 11,616 American lives in 1969. The word about the terrible My Lai Massacre got published in 1969, and the prime perpetrator, Lt. William Calley, got not no more than a slap on the wrist. October saw the massive and nationwide Vietnam Moratorium war protests.

What's scary is that the most vapid, the most insipid song in the history of music was able to come in at Number One on any list except maybe one identifying the most annoyingly cloying bubble gum music of the last hundred years. And it came from a fuckin' CARTOON SHOW on television, and was performed by working-for-scale studio musicians who no doubt hide cringing under their beds when Casey Kasem plays their retrospective on American Top 40.

So, without further ado, here it is, the Number One song of 1969:

A Storm is Coming

Here's Kieth Olbermann at the top of his game. Watch it.

Seven Republicans Who Would Not Be Welcome in Today's Party

Thanks to 50 Quotes Americans Should Remember, here are some telling words from some prominent Republicans from the past, in more or less chronological order. In this list are five former US presidents, one presidential candidate and one Supreme Court justice.

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
-- Abraham Lincoln

"We all agree that neither the Government nor political parties ought to interfere with religious sects. It is equally true that religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or with political parties. We believe that the cause of good government and the cause of religion suffer by all such interference."
"We all agree that neither the Government nor political parties ought to interfere with religious sects. It is equally true that religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or with political parties. We believe that the cause of good government and the cause of religion suffer by all such interference."
-- Rutherford B. Hayes

"I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"The supreme duty of the Nation is the conservation of human resources through an enlightened measure of social and industrial justice. We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly in State and Nation for … the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use."
"I believe that there should be a very much heavier progressive tax on very large incomes, a tax which should increase in a very marked fashion for the gigantic incomes."
"It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize."
-- Theodore Roosevelt

"Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of their right to join the union of their choice."
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security."
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"While I am a great believer in the free enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment."
"Today's so-called 'conservatives' don't even know what the word means. They think I've turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That's a decision that's up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders or the Religious Right. It's not a conservative issue at all."
"Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."
-- Barry Goldwater

"Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost."
"We establish no religion in this country. We command no worship. We mandate no belief, nor will we ever. Church and state are and must remain separate."
-- Ronald Reagan

[emphasis added]

Can you imagine any one of the Pathetic Clowns in the current roster of presidential hopefuls saying anything remotely like these ideas? Well, maybe John Huntsman, the only one of them who seems even a bit rational, and you know how far he's gotten in the political dogfight for the hearts and minds of the Rethug rank and file.

George Soros and Gun Control?

Jeez, it just never stops. Regular readers know that I have a wackjob cousin who insists on sending me the worst kind of crap imaginable. But I don't cut her off because they are invariably entertaining. Plus I can almost always count on them to provide fodder for the OPOVet gristmill.

Here's today's example:

Don't know if this true or not ! Worth checking out .
Subject: WOW! This is scary!
For the last several years a company called "The Freedom Group" has been buying up American gun and ammunition manufacturers.
Some of these companies are:Bushmaster,
Marlin,
Remington,
DPMS,
Dakota Arms and
H&R.
DPMS Panther Arms
NEF
Dakota Arms
LC Smith
Parker
AAC
Barnes Bullets
EOTAC
INTC
Some people worry that Freedom Group is going to control most of the firearms companies in the United States. Of course, If you control the manufacturers you can decide not to sell to civilians, or, you can raise the prices to rediculous levels or you can make the supply of guns and ammo scarce - all sorts of logjams.
What a perfect way to control America's guns!
If you do some digging you will see that The Freedom Group is owned by a Wall Street investment company called "Cerberus Capital Management".
"Cerberus" in the epic book "The Inferno" by Dante Alighieri, is a three-headed demon hound (from Roman mythology) that guards the Gates of Hell to prevent those damned souls who have just crossed the river Styx, from escaping back to the world.
Investor GEORGE SOROS owns Cerberus!
Please pass this on to all your freedom loving friends. This needs to come out - and quickly! Why have we not heard about this in the "mainstream" media? I would think this would be BIG news.
The absence of big media coverage on this important subject should be BIG news to you, too!

You'd think that an email that starts out with "Don't know if this true or not! Worth checking out" would normally be followed by the person actually, you know, checking it out. But in this case you would be wrong.

Here's what I found with a minimal amount of actual effort. Yeah "BIG news", and it's also big news to Snopes:

As the National Rifle Association's Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) notes on their web site:
Recently, an old rumor regarding Cerberus — the private equity firm that owns Freedom group, a holding company that in turn owns a number of firearms manufacturers, including Remington, Marlin, Bushmaster, and DPMS — was in some way tied to George Soros.
This rumor is completely false and baseless.
NRA has had contact with officials from Cerberus and Freedom Group for some time. The owners and investors involved are strong supporters of the Second Amendment and are avid hunters and shooters.
In reality, at no time has George Soros ever been a part of the ownership group of Freedom Group or Cerberus, and as a privately traded corporation, there is no possibility that he will be in the future.
This unsubstantiated rumor has caused a great deal of unnecessary concern for gun owners. NRA-ILA urges our members to take great care before repeating baseless rumors found on the Internet.

George Soros appears nowhere on the Cerberus list of senior executives, unlike such other notable socialist-communist-fascist gun control freaks as ... Dan Quayle and Baby Doc Bush's former Treasury Secretary John W. Snow.

Sometimes you gotta laugh. Sometimes you gotta cry. And sometimes you gotta do Andre Breton's ultimate surrealist act: "...dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd." --Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1929.

Okay, all you wingnut pantywaists, don't flame me over this. I'm just fucking kidding!!!!!